Sinatra and Rails are web frameworks the programming language Ruby. Pylons and Django are a web framework for the programming language Python.

Rails and Django are more "batteries included" and Pylons and Sinatra are more "some assembly required", so you probably want to lean toward the former since you don't need a ton of customization, which will save some developer time. There's very little end-user difference between Rails and Django, so no preference there.

Living in Austin will make finding a good python/ruby developer much easier. IMHO, for your needs, after making sure the developer is passed a basic skill level( have you made a website with credit card payments + user accounts? ) communication + budget are more important things to look for.

When I was first learning how to code, I may or may not have contributed a lot of code to a PHP framework that rhymes with osTommerce, code that is probably still there... code that should never have seen the light of day...

Holy this was antagonistic as hell. FYI, I never said anything about the languages themselves, only gave OP advice as he clearly doesn't know anything about programming.

Facebook is written in PHP, but he writes it off because of some bullshit reason.

Yes I know Facebook is written in PHP (oh and by the way, only a subset of PHP is supported by hiphop). I wrote it off because it's a easy language to learn, so you got ton of idiots running around claiming they're PHP devs cause they completed a tutorial or 2. And I'm not sure if you noticed, but it is really easy to write terrible terrible code in PHP, moreso than other languages IMHO. OP can't distinguish a good PHP coder from a bad, so why take the risk?

The Twitter front-end is written in RoR, but gksandman writes it off because he doesn't have a fucking clue what he's talking about.

I never said anything bad about RoR, so dunno where you get that I "wrote it off". I said it was second best to python only because it's hard to find ruby devs. And fyi, rails is pretty bloated, I'd take sinatra over it any day.

Resumés are not useless

Resumes are absolutely completely fucking useless. Show me what you've done, give me website links or a github. I don't care what your title was, or who you know, or what company you worked at. Show me what YOU did, and let your work speak for itself.

Bcrypt isn't used by anyone in the industry, every company I have worked for uses SHA-1 or SHA-2.

Aha, now I know you're a troll. At first I thought you were an embittered PHP freelancer, but this last statement means you're either a troll or an idiot. SHA/MD5/etc are not good for hashing passwords not because they are cryptographically insecure, but because they're fast. This means when you get hacked and your database is compromised, it takes a long time for the hackers to decrypt the passwords, and if you set it up correctly, it would take too long for them to brute force it. Of course, your website would take longer to verify a password for a user to log in, but the extra 0.5 seconds it would take to use bcrypt per login means an extra 0.5 seconds per brute force attempt, which adds up :)

Oh, they're a vocal minority on the internet but they are a fairly small minority. I think I saw some basic surveys recently that showed Ruby was used to build less than 5% of all websites or something.

More power to you if you find them, they usually have the same lower limit of skill as the python devs.

Sorry, I have 0 experience with outsourcing development. I suspect that many of those horror stories are because cheap people and outsourcing tend to go hand in hand, and being cheap when looking for a developer is going to burn you in the long run no matter where you are in the world.

Honestly, if I were to outsource, I'd look for a developer at 75% ish of what I'd pay a local (US) developer, but I'd be well aware that communication will be much more difficult. The money you save on outsourcing may not be worth it if communication becomes an issue.

Oh fantastic, you have a real budget! No sarcasm, a lot of idea people will want someone to give them a website for sub $1k.

So scratch learning it how to do it yourself, you can afford to pay someone.

If I were you I'd do the following:

Mock up what you want the website to look like using pencil + paper, photoshop, whatever. Make sure you also include what happens when you hover, when you click, etc.

Put up ads for a web developer or designer. Understand that the front end of the website( how it looks ) is separate from the back end( how it works ). Most people, regardless of title, can usually do one of those well, and one of those not so well.

Judge front end by visual inspection of their portfolio, and back end by complexity of their portfolio ( user account system, private message system, order tracking, ecommerce, etc).

Hire someone who does back end well, irregardless of their skill at front end. You don't need the most beautiful front end right away, show the backend guy your mockup and tell him to find you a close matching template.

If your backend guy is remotely decent, he will prefer platform as a service (PaaS) or virtual private server (VPS) over shared hosting. Have him buy you a domain name (www.mysite.com) as well as the hosting.

Now that you have back end set up, and have decent template in place, hire someone( pay per project ) to give you a custom template to more closely match your mockup. Try to find a web designer that is familiar with your back end("platform"), otherwise you will need to re-hire your back end guy to convert what the front end guy made to something that works with your back end.

Price breakdown should be:

$12/yr for domain name

$50-100/yr for the hosting

$5-10k for the developer's time

Left over money goes to web designer to fix up front end.

In terms of languages or frameworks to look for:

PHP + Cake/symfony/etc: I would generally avoid developers in this language. It is very easy to learn, thus the range of skill is very large, thus the absolute number of bad PHP developers is very large, thus your chance of getting one of those is very high. If you had more coding knowledge, you might be able to distinguish skill, but I wouldn't risk it.

Python + Django: Probably your best bet. Not as many bad ones as in PHP, most have some clue of what they're doing. They will be more expensive than PHP developers.

Flash/actionscript: AVOID

Ruby + Rails/Sinatra/whatever: Second best bet, but unlikely to find.

HTML/CSS/Javascript: everyone is going to have this on their resume, so just ignore it.

Some more clarification:

What you see on a website is HTML and CSS and Javascript. This is also what pure web designers will produce. However, some of the HTML/CSS/Javascript is not hand-written, but auto-generated by other criteria(what user is this, what have they clicked on before, what's in their shopping cart, etc.). The code to generate the auto generated HTML/CSS/Javascript is written in the language of your back end, and also in the specific framework of your back end. Thus, if you can find a web designer that is familiar with your backend, they can convert your mockup into something that will work with your backend directly, versus creating HTML/CSS/Javascript that your back end guy will have to figure out how to autogenerate inside the current back end.

P.S. the line between back end and front end is very fuzzy. titles are meaningless